“The buyer contacts the seller, who lures the former into continuing the talk through a third party messenger, such as WhatsApp. The ads usually offer cameras, game consoles, laptops, smartphones, and similar items for sale at deliberately low prices,” Group-IB explain. “As part of the scheme, scammers publish bait ads on popular marketplaces and classified websites. The scam has been spotted in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Poland, Romania, the US, and post-Soviet countries, according to Group-IB. That may seem like small-fry, but it’s a significant chunk of people’s income in some countries. The scams, when successful, net criminals an average of around $120 per user conned, according to analysis by Group-IB. At the coronavirus pandemic pushed people to shop online, activity for the scam spiked as people fell prey to the scam in greater numbers. It has been conning people out of cash in Russia since at least the summer of 2019, when it was first spotted by Kargalev and his colleagues at Group-IB. It’s not the first time when Russia serves as a testing ground for cybercriminals with global ambitions.” “We see that Classiscammers are now actively migrating from Russia to Europe and other countries. “In the summer of 2020 we took down 280 scam pages as part of the Classiscam scheme, and by December that number grew 10-fold and reached up to 3,000 pages,” says Yaroslav Kargalev, the deputy head of Group-IB’s Computer Emergency Response Team. The Classiscam plot itself isn’t new it’s been extant in Russia for a long time. The platforms that have been recreated in order to launch the scam, which has been dubbed “Classiscam” by Group-IB, include Leboncoin, Allegro, OLX, FAN Courier and Sbazar. The scheme utilises Telegram bots that generate ready-to-use web pages that look incredibly similar to some of the most widely used classified and marketplace websites and apps, as well as occasionally echoing delivery services. More than 40 groups worldwide, half of whom are in Russia, are operating the scam, which is targeting users of European marketplaces and classified advert websites and accounts.
The Classiscam has been identified by Group-IB, targeting western countries.Ī massive scam launched on Telegram through a network of bot accounts has scammed victims worldwide out of $6.5 million in the last year, according to global threat hunting and adversary-centric cyber intelligence company Group-IB.
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